They finish each other’s sentences and inspire each other’s muses, so luckily for Boston’s Billy Carl Mancini and Ruby Bird, their marriage goes hand-in-hand with their long-time accordion/guitar musical partnership, Bird Mancini. It’s at the least an outlet that melds their wide-ranging musical gifts into something utterly engaging and impossible to pigeonhole, regardless of whether they’re accompanied by additional bandmates.

The duo, which has been a fixture in Boston-area blues and roots clubs for much of the past decade, brings its eclectic sound back to Norwood’s Perks Coffeehouse on Friday. It’s not a "regular'' Bird Mancini gig – it’s an Urban Caravan gig, and more on that in a moment – but we were happy to find the duo still riding high on its excellent 2007 album "Funny Day,'' and expanding its tours to national and international locales.

In addition to the Perks gig, look for them at Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville on July 10, and at Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon on Oct. 11.

Q: You recently played in the U.K. at the Liverpool installment of the International Pop Overthrow. What was that like?

RUBY BIRD: We didn’t get our official invitation until late February so we weren’t quite sure it was going to happen. And the most important thing was to get our drummer a passport! We had to expedite it and his ID was all sketchy.

BILLY CARL MANCINI: He finally got it, so we all went over there as a band and it was a great crowd, just bands and audiences from all over the world. And we played on a Monday, which was for us Memorial Day but for them a bank holiday, which to them was a big reason to get drunk. The whole of Mathew Street – where places like (Beatles birthplace) the Cavern Pub are – it was all day long and a great experience. On a Monday.

Q: How is an Urban Caravan show different from a quote-unquote normal Bird Mancini gig?

BCM: Well, Bird Mancini is either just the two of us or us with a full band. Urban Caravan is a group of musicians; traveling troubadours, really. It all started when (the Stompers’) Sal Baglio and I were conversing over e-mail about the Traveling Wilburys and that we should get something like that together. So that’s how it works: several people will play two or three of their own songs and then start to sit in, play some cover material as well, get everyone onstage. It’s a lot of people to put in small venues, but we do enjoy each other’s company. At Perks we’ll have us, Sal, Mr. Curt Ensemble, Ramona Silver and St. Maxwell.

Q: I imagine you find a lot of folks who want to join the Caravan and participate.

RB: Yeah, you can be in it if you want.

BCM: We’re at a limit now because you can’t get 20 musicians into certain venues. You kind of need to have a cutoff.

RB: Yes, we have expanded quite a bit already, and it’s all been good. It hasn’t gotten so big yet that anyone’s ever been in the way.

BCM: Right. We’re trying to keep it very organic – it’s supposed to look like it’s fun and that we’re having fun doing it. And we are.

Q: "Funny Day'' has been out for a while and its songs have had time to marinate as you’ve been playing them live. Do you have any new impressions of the material now?

RB: Not really. We’re still promoting it as though the majority of people in the country haven’t heard it, and we’re taking it out to the West Coast with a Northwest tour planned in July. And we’re writing other stuff in the meantime but we’re not at the point where we can do another album – we don’t yet have the resources. But ("Funny Day") hasn’t been overplayed and is still new enough that we can take it to new audiences and different types of venues.

Q: It would seem there are lots of areas of the country where your sound might be embraced – lots of possibilities for a "destination tour,'' in other words. Why the Northwest?

BCM: Ruby has a friend who’s promoting shows all over the West Coast, so that’s how it started. What we like is that out there there are no preconceptions about Bird Mancini – when people see us we’re 100 percent new. We’ve been here for a long time in Boston so when people come to see us they know what they’re going to get. If we go out there, we can play the same set in 10 different venues.

Q: You mentioned new material – what does it sound like in relation to previous songs you’ve written?

RB: The new material is still sort of in development – maybe a little rootsier than "Funny Day.'' It’s hard for me to think in terms of how songs are different from each other because they’re all inspired by whatever’s going on. As you probably know we’re pretty eclectic and absorb a lot of things from psychedelic rock to jazz, blues, accordion rock ... and I don’t think Billy or I write songs to "fit'' anything. We write whatever inspires us. Sometimes when we put albums together we can take something that was written 10 to 15 years ago and find it would really work.

BCM: If you think about anything too much, you’re done for. I have a cousin who’s a 20-year-old guitar player, and my advice to him is always "stop thinking so much about what you’re doing.'' I think that’s the way music should be.

Sister Publications

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
Times Reporter ~ 629 Wabash Ave. NW New Philadelphia, OH 44663 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service